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September 30, 1999 is an important if somewhat forgettable day in San Francisco sports history. That’s the day when the Giants played their final home game at Candlestick Park, and the day that stadium became a football-only venue. The Giants have spent their last 19 seasons playing in the stadium now known as Oracle Park….

Baseball Tonight is dead and gone. The longtime ESPN studio mainstay was already wheezing out its final gasps of life after they relegated it out of daily status, but recent news confirmed that it wouldn’t be returning for the 2019 season. I’m skeptical that ESPN and the people in charge of distributing MLB content will…

In high school, one of the mandatory courses was succinctly named “Technology,” in which students cycled through various stations acquiring largely non-essential information. These stations consisted of things like career placement tests (my routinely no. 1 and no. 2 ranked jobs were circus performer and sanitation engineer), typing games we had mastered by grade 7,…

Unless you’ve extended indefinitely your holiday break or decided to finally part with the material world, you’re by now well aware that the past two off-seasons have sparked a bit of contention between the players/MLBPA and the owners. The specificities of the brewing conflict can be quite difficult to fully grasp, particularly since the animosity…

If you search Mike Trout’s Twitter account for the airplane emoji, you will find 168 tweets in which it is paired with some number of exclamation marks and often accompanying the name of a city. The first such tweet dates back to September 18th, 2013, the day the Angels ended a 10-game road trip and…

Lou Castro, as he preferred to be called, made his major league debut on April 23, 1902 for the Philadelphia Athletics. His professional baseball career lasted a paltry 42 games, in which he hit .245 with 15 RBI. On their way to winning the pennant, the Athletics removed him from the team in favor of…

Every year at Christmas I made my dad lebkuchen, a spicy, chewy German cookie. That description makes them sound good, so let me assure you they are not: They are, in fact, the world’s worst cookie. The dough is sticky and unmanageable, and very finicky: I ruined a whole sheet this year by daring to…

On June 22nd, 1914, just nine games into his career with the St. Louis Terriers, Armando Marsáns woke up to the news that he was no longer able to play professional baseball. He suffered from no illness or injury but rather something more sinister. Several days prior, August Herrmann, owner of the Cincinnati Reds and…

Baseball is a game built on failure, and the successful separate themselves through their ability to cope with failure. In many cases, coping with failure begins with accepting its enduring presence without dwelling on it, when the objective becomes living without regrets. Of course, this goal is inherently unachievable; every day players encounter regrets large…

Lou Castro, as he preferred to be called, made his major league debut on April 23, 1902 for the Philadelphia Athletics. His professional baseball career lasted a paltry 42 games, in which he hit .245 with 15 RBI. On their way to winning the pennant, the Athletics removed him from the team in favor of…

They brought baseball under the cover of cannon fire; within weeks of the Battle of Manila, soldiers were playing baseball in the fields, demonstrating their Americanness to the new Americans. Designed to supplant the local sport of cockfighting and instill cultural values and language, it proved a clumsy and effective propaganda, as the sport swept…

Don’t think about the last time you attended a funeral in Pittsburgh. Don’t think about your great aunt’s funeral on one of those cold gray days the city specializes in. A city with less sunshine than Seattle; a city clouded in funereal gray. Your sister stands next to you, and your shoes sink in the…

The margins are thin. Consider the player in the title above. Goldschmidt is one of the more famous prospect industry misses, but if his hit tool had actually slipped a bit, the margin between all-star and below-average would be razor thin. Or consider that the original title for this article was going to be “A…

If “9=8” and “Rocktober” have taught us anything, it’s that, come September and October, the English language is no friend to baseball players. So difficult is it to craft catchy yet sensical slogans, it wasn’t even attempted until the contemporary era. Yet the early stages of professional baseball teemed with dramatic storylines and plucky underdogs…

After a brief appearance in the majors in 2017, Atlanta sent Max Fried to the Arizona Fall League to continue gaining experience after losing almost two full seasons to Tommy John surgery. The AFL, “prospect graduate school,” is a weird mashup of MiLB and summer camp, flavored with a heavy dose of small sample size….

As the Dodgers and Rockies began their tiebreaker game, I filed into an auditorium that was both too hot and too cold to listen to Ken Burns give a lecture titled “Sharing The American Experience.” As a baseball fan and somebody who studies American history, Ken Burns has long been a figure that people assume…